How to create generic animated panels in Silverlight 2 and 3

Introduction

I’ve always had mixed feelings toward animations in cases of generic controls, panels or item controls. From one side it is extremely easy to define standard animations associated with visual states. From the other implementing any more sophisticated animation means that a generic control becomes a user control. In this first article in series I shall present ways we know in our team to make Framework Elements with non-trivial animations without sacrificing theirs genericness. In short – it is easy to create a generic FrameworkElement, but it is hard to create such with advanced animations so it is still generic. In part number one we shall deal with animations in Panels.